After a vital qualifier for the 2002 World Cup, the government baked a cake with 12,000 eggs, which it delivered across Tehran in refrigerated trucks. But sweets weren’t enough to restore the faith of youth. They have begun to seek out an alternative to both mullahs and reformist mullahs like Khatami. So far, the alternative hasn’t taken a clear shape, but there are signs of direction. There’s considerable nostalgia among youth for the days of the shah, even if they themselves never lived through them. Bootleg tapes of pop stars from the past have circulated widely; the necktie has been in resur-gence. It’s the same impulse behind the football revolutionaries shouting the name of the shah’s son.
What should the West make of the football revolution? It’s plausible that it represents the inevitable challenge that globalization poses to Islam. But that can’t be the whole story. Soccer thrives in much of the Muslim world without counteracting radicalism.
Hezbollah sponsors a soccer team in Lebanon and has in the past bought broadcasting rights to the Asian Nations’ Cup for its radio network. The
Wahabi-oriented Gulf States have imported aging Western stars for one last paycheck to play in their leagues. They have built princely arenas with marble and gold leaf, like the awesome, Bedouin-inspired King Fadh International Stadium in Riyadh.
What makes the football revolution di¤erent is that it has tapped into nationalist fervor and turned it against the state. As great as the Iranian commitment to Islam is the Iranian commitment to Iran—the two haven’t always been one and the same. There’s a recent history of secular nationalism that serves as an alternative. It might not be the optimal alternative, but for now it will have to do. d
H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s
t h e A m e r i c a n C u l t u re Wa r s
I.
My soccer career began in 1982, at the age of eight.
This was an entirely di¤erent moment in the history of American soccer, well before the youth game acquired its current, highly evolved infrastructure. Our teams didn’t have names. We had jersey colors that we used to refer to ourselves: “Go Maroon!” Our coach, a bearded German named Gunther, would bark at us in continental nomenclature that didn’t quite translate into English. Urging me to stop a ball with my upper body, he would cry out, “Use your breasts, Frankie!”
That I should end up a soccer player defied the time-tested laws of sporting heredity. For generations, fathers bequeathed their sporting loves unto their sons. My father, like most men of his baby boom age, had grown up madly devoted to baseball. Why didn’t my dad adhere to the practice of handing his game to his son? The answer has to do with the times and the class to which my parents belonged, by which I mean, they were children of the sixties and we lived in the yuppie confines of Upper Northwest Washington, D.C., a dense aggregation of Ivy League lawyers with aggressively liberal politics and exceptionally protective parenting styles. Nearly everyone in our family’s social set signed up their children to play soccer. It was the fashionable thing to do. On Monday mornings, at school, we’d each walk around in the same cheaply made pair of white shorts with the logo of our league, Montgomery Soccer Inc.
Steering your child into soccer may have been fashionable, but it wasn’t a decision to be made lightly.
When my father played sandlot baseball, he could walk three blocks to his neighborhood diamond. With soccer, this simply wasn’t possible. At this early moment in the youth soccer boom, the city of Washington didn’t have any of its own leagues. My parents would load up our silver Honda Accord and drive me to fields deep in sub-urban Maryland, 40-minute drives made weekly across a landscape of oversized hardware stores and newly minted real estate developments. In part, these drives would take so long because my parents would circle, hopelessly lost, through neighborhoods they had never before visited and would likely never see again.
As I later discovered, my parents made this sacrifice of their leisure time because they believed that soccer could be transformational. I su¤ered from a painful, rather extreme case of shyness. I’m told that it extended beyond mere clinging to my mother’s leg. On the sidelines at halftime, I would sit quietly on the edge of the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS
other kids’ conversations, never really interjecting myself. My parents had hoped that the game might necessitate my becoming more aggressive, a breaking through of inhibitions.
The idea that soccer could alleviate shyness was not an idiosyncratic parenting theory. It tapped into the conventional wisdom among yuppie parents. Soccer’s appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports.
For children of the sixties, there was something abhor-rent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn’t just incidental but inherent.
They didn’t want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird’s prime, still had the taint of the ghetto.
But soccer represented something very di¤erent. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
Unlike the other sports, it would foster self-esteem, minimize the pain of competition while still teaching life lessons. Dick Wilson, the executive director of the American Youth Soccer Organization since the early seventies, described the attitude this way: “We would like to provide the child a chance to participate in a less competitive, win-oriented atmosphere. . . . We require
